Topic: BitMutiny: The case for a Bitcoin hostile hard fork (Read 922 times)

Everything is centralised, BTC is not so different. In fact, decentralisation cannot exist just like the stars in our system.

Centralisation is the only pathway to success.

There have only ever been two hard forks of the blockchain in the history of Bitcoin, and both nearly killed Bitcoin.

The first was overseen by Satoshi in an attempt to fix the worst Bitcoin bug seen to date, and an unforeseen fork in which BerkeleyDB was replaced with LevelDB to allow for blocks greater than 512kb to be accepted by the network. The latter fork however didn't disenfranchise older clients by forcing them to use LevelDB over BerkeleyDB – a one line workaround resolves the bug in clients still running with BerkeleyDB.

Now the scaling ph0rk fuss will create a blockchain incompatible with any previous version of Bitcoin. Nodes who do not wish to upgrade will reject the larger or segwit or whatevs blocks, while continuing to accept blocks on their own chain. Many don't seem to yet understand the implications of a Bitcoin hard fork this late in the protocol's maturity.

Typical VC mainstreameries trying to highjack the Holy Ledger to cope with their parasitic business models and their sociopathic cash burning rate.

You just used the words governed and uncorruptible in the same sentence.  

Anyway, Im not convinced the end game is anyone gaining 51% necessarily.
Certainly not by pools.

Didn't Gavin have some ideas of neutralizing a 51% attack?

In a way, a 51% ownership of all the mining power, governed by an anonymous and uncorruptible body, would benefit the network by ensuring that there would be no-one else that could potentially challenge the network and lead to all the issues we would see. At the same time, this might disrupt the network, and people will lose confidence. This all comes down to someone's perception, and I doubt the user base would we willing to allow for something like this to happen.

I don't fully agree with the post, but it does show some concepts that might have their place.

I don't think you read the post at all.  The end game game theory of PoW is to form a monpoly with greater than 50% hash rate placed in multiple rathole pools (sybil attack) because if you don't do it, someone else can, so it's the only logical move to protect your investment.  In other words, you're accomplishing the attack you seek to prevent (but not executing it) to stop the other guy from doing it.  Since there's no way to know who owns the pools, it's a system of security through obscurity.

While being not so likely, for all you know, Satoshi owns every mining pool that's ever existed.  The point is, the system is designed to monopolize, while also being almost impossible to verify the real state of security of the system at any given time.  If you accept that as a security model, you're also accepting a security model of someone owning over 50% hash rate out in the open.

Any argument against alternative consensus mechanisms has to take the above facts about PoW into account, but the people who argue against them usually face paper tigers opponents instead of me, so PoW always ends up looking a million times better than it should be.  The real, non-biased starting point of the discussion should be that things like PoW with pool mining may not be valid at all, so there's probably plenty of alternatives worth considering.



If you're going to play that semantics argument, then Bitcoin doesn't currently exist and you're already using an altcoin since Bitcoin has been hard forked multiple times before.

if i posted this Frank would have bent over and unloaded a sht storm of criticism

on me, while claiming ive gone through several personality disorder shfts

and was overdue to do the shopping

"deterministic selection of block producers" = another way of saying "Proof of Stake".

There's people working on such projects to spin off a POS version of Bitcoin
if you search the altcoin section.   (personally I dont think the odds are high that they'll get far)

If I read correctly, you're missing the whole point of cryptocurrencies: the decentralised aspect of it. If it's decentralised, a new coin or crypt or technology would always trump any wrongdoing by an evil force. It's the power of the community againts the evil of some individuals.

Heh, ph0rkers and their shitcoins, nothing new.

On chain scaling and coffee tipping wet dreams, whatever rocks the VC boat.

Bitcoin and "blockchain technology" aint gonna save you anyway.

BitMutiny:  The case for a hostile hard fork - Scaling solution for holders instead of ideologues and miners


Introduction

Dozens of articles are currently appearing per day to try and make the case for who controls Bitcoin.  Some claim the users, some claim the miners, others claim the devs themselves hold the keys to the network.  The following is what I consider the objective reality of the situation, and what you, the common man, can do to attempt to protect yourself against these factions, along with a scaling solution that puts the actual users ahead of the special interest groups.


Part 1:  Developers are not your friend

On the developer side, we have people trying to make the case that whoever lives in the biggest ivory tower with the most PhDs should control everything, which is basically a technocracy by definition.  Supporters of this movement tend to either be the ones living in the ivory tower themselves, or users who don't understand the issues and want to outsource the problem to someone else hoping for the best.

While a technocracy might sound good on paper, a large portion, or maybe even the majority of the ivory tower's inhabitants might happen to be completely dysfunctional outside the arena of doing differential equations in their heads.  What might sound good on paper could be handing the keys to humanity over to Richard Stallman and having civilization implode five minutes later.  The other downfall here is that PhDs can only take you so far, to a point where choices have to become subjective and it's all just a war of opinions between ideologues like Luke Jr, Gmaxwell, or Amir Taaki.  Basically a system of neverending gridlock with no way forward like systemD in Linux.

With this choice, it also doesn't really matter if the developers have good intentions or admit it or not, but the last thing they're thinking of when making a decision is caring about whether some random guy loses his life savings in Bitcoin.  If it's required for everyone to go flat broke to satisfy their ideology, they will not hesitate to pull the Machiavelli card on you.  This is not a personal attack, this is just how human nature works.  Their personal ideology and ego will always trump your monetary appreciation in their own minds.  That's just the way it is.  They can also be bribed or extorted at any given time.

Part 2:  The Miners

This is one of the more confusing factions of Bitcoin for many people.  You'll often see the argument that the users control Bitcoin because the miners are forced to mine at a profit, meaning the miners can't make any choice that would just cause everyone to leave like raising the coin count.  I would say this argument is objectively false.  The miners actually do control Bitcoin, your only role is price speculator after the fact of their actions.  The miners are not forced to be "rational", they can do anything they want.

Another example would be a choice appearing in the Bitcoin ecosystem that's kind of a big deal, but not big enough to cause more than a negligble amount of users to leave regardless of which choice is picked.  Under this circumstance, the miners just choose whatever is most profitable.  They've then demonstrated they're the real controllers of the system, and life goes on.

As for trying to portray who the good and bad guys are in Bitcoin, the developers are going to be a benign entity at best, while the miners are going to fall even lower on the totem pole under necessary evil in a best case scenario.  PoW is a war game simulation, and just like any real war, only the most ruthless, cunning, and resourceful win.  Some devs will claim this is false, but it's designed from the ground up to try and force monopoly (51%+ or selfish mining attacks).  Yes, having 51% hash rate out in the open would be detrimental to your profits, but so would any of your adversaries doing so by opening you to attack yourself.  Thus, in any real game theory scenario, all users are required to attempt to gain over 50% hash rate and do so in secrecy through sybil attack (multiple pools).  This is why I say Satoshi did not make any advancement in the Byzantine generals problem:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/satoshi-didnt-solve-the-byzantine-generals-problem-1183043

Miners are also not even necessarily users of Bitcoin.  Many miners just mine and dump everything in an attempt to profit.  It seems we've discovered a pattern here.  Both developers and miners do not fundamentally even care about the well being of Bitcoin users.

In conclusion, my analysis is that the outside entropy provided by miners does not actually provide the security claimed since it's based on a false premise, along with false assumptions that do not adhere to basic game theory.  This is not to say mining is useless, it's required for distribution, it's just a whole lot less useful after distribution is over and becomes more of an attack vector then.

Part 3:  The Users

Here is where you come in.  If Bitcoin is not designed for it's users, then who is it designed for?  Both the miners and developers have been demonstrated to not really have the interests of the users in mind, while likely having objectively more power over the system than you do.  Is this rational at all?  I would say no.

Although Bitcoin can mean different things to different people, it was initially introduced as a peer to peer currency using game theory to remove the 3rd party trust.  In other words, the only real consideration for the future of Bitcoin should be the financial well being and security of it's users, not developer ideologues, not miners, just maintaining or increasing your wealth while reducing possibility of attack as much as you can.

Part 4:  Scaling to maximize benefit and security of users (i.e. holders) instead of ideologues and miners

If it wasn't obvious, due to the way velocity of money works, scaling Bitcoin to the highest potential possible is required to maximize the network effect and increase the wealth of it's users.  For anyone with a basic understanding of economics, sitting on a 1MB block size is an extremely bad idea for your wallet's purchasing power denominated in Bitcoin, if it can at all be avoided.  While we could increase the block size, this is a solution that offers only a small gain, a kick the can down the road solution, and does nothing to address the current pecking order of the user's financial well being considered last in the equation of importance as highlighted above.  Miners are also currently incentivized to mine empty blocks and not include any transactions, and they won't be until a theoretical solution called IBLT is implemented...maybe a year or two from now...maybe several years from from now, just like segwit and the lightning network...

The problem is, Bitcoin is at the start of S-Curve exponential growth.  We don't need kick the can down the road solutions arriving years from now, we need orders of magnitude growth solutions, and we need them now.  The current proposed solutions also all rely on the false assumptions of the PoW security model that don't even pass basic game theory, they've just been ignored all this time to not disrupt potential financial gain.  The lightning network is also a non-solution, an "if all else fails" backup option at best due to operating off-chain.  A real solution is obviously on-chain.

There's only one real low hanging fruit available for non-trivial scaling in the immediate future, and even developers who are currently breaking their keyboard over their head while reading this post know it, and it's deterministic selection of block producers.  Instead of getting some trivial 10 TPS from segwit or increasing the block size without IBLT, you're getting a few orders of magnitude higher TPS throughput with way faster confirmation time.

How could such a change be rolled out in Bitcoin?  Possibly using CLTV and a hard fork.  You set a future block for the fork at least six months out so ASIC miners know their hardware will be useless by then anyway, and when that block is reached, the top 1001 (or other arbitrary number) locked CLTV amounts (let's say 1 month or higher lock limit for example) become your deterministic block producers.  Either continuing to use the CLTV variable to determine who the block producers are in the future, or converting it to a new variable, basically collateral bids.

When you use a collateral bid system and a fixed number of block producers, you're basically baking in a certain level of decentralization that can't be matched by the guaranteed, designed to monopolize system of PoW.  Even if you own a ton of coins, it's very hard to outbid all the other 1000 slots for example.  With a flat rate system they could, but not a bid system.  The deterministic block producers would likely also create decentralized checkpoints every certain number of blocks and the number of block producers has to be high enough to prevent collusion in said checkpoints.  The decentralized checkpoints can then be used for pruning once a year or whatever time period you give for worst case scenario of global internet failure and reconnection from disaster or war.  Keeping blocks forever is not really necessary for reasonable state recovery.

This is where it gets controversial.  What do you do with the remaining coins left to be mined?  The deterministic block producers need to be incentivized for the system to work, so they need at least the normal Bitcoin end game payout of transaction fees.  If you gave them a continuation of the normal block reward plus transaction fees, some would claim this is a rich get richer system, but it's really not.  Worst case scenario, they would just be continuing with their original percentage of the blockchain over time compared to other whales.  The interesting part is, they would not want to be outbid by others in collateral and lose this income stream.  Instead of the "mine and dump" system of Bitcoin we have now, there would be massive upwards pressure on price from people trying to accumulate enough coins to make the cut for the fixed number of block producers.  In that scenario, it's more of a futures market where instead of being rewarded by whoever invests the most in ASICs, you're rewarding people who invest in Bitcoin itself.

In this case, the price would explode upwards and all parties are rewarded equally.  Why?  Because normal users would see huge price appreciation without having to risk any type of investment besides the coins they already have.  The whales who accumulate enough coins to become the block producers are putting up lots of money bidding against others as a risky investment, futures type option.  If they're rewarded, it's for taking a risk on futures.  Normal users see large price gains for free due to the bid market existing.  I see that as a fair trade off, but some might not for whatever reason.  Mining is monopolized and closed off to the general public ever since the first ASIC was invented, so this system sure doesn't exclude many if anyone.

The alternative is much more complicated.  I'm not entirely familiar with Peercoin, but I believe the PoW in Peercoin is used for distribution and doesn't do anything for security.  You could let people mine solely for block reward, while deterministic block producers provide security and receive transaction fees, but this system would be harder to pull off, or maybe not possible.